How America came to hate FJB

by Don Surber

People forget that before there were chants of FJB, he was pretty popular. He had a plus 23 rating on job approval as his presidency began and six months later he was at plus 9.6, a very respectable score. Trump was never anywhere close to 9.6 — even on his inauguration day.

Biden was the most unknown president since William Howard Taft to the American people. Most people knew two things about Biden: 1) he was Obama’s VP and 2) he wasn’t Donald Trump. Three years ago, Americans saw No. 2 as a good thing.

On July 22, 2021, Disney’s 538 gushed,

“The first six months in the White House are often frenzied for presidents as they push for big policy changes to try to live up to their campaign promises. President Biden is no exception. In his first 100 days in office, he signed dozens of executive actions and pursued sweeping legislation, like his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package, which offered Americans further relief from the pandemic, and his ambitious two-step infrastructure plan. The hope for Biden, as with most presidents, is that his accomplishments will placate Americans who already support him while also winning over some who don’t.

“But as it turns out, few Americans have changed their minds since the 2020 election. Biden’s job approval rating over his first six months in office was the steadiest such rating of any recent president during that period, according to FiveThirtyEight’s historical approval rating data. His approval has ranged from a high of 55.1% on March 22 to a low of 51.1% on July 15 — a difference of just 4 percentage points.”

Then came August. As the month began, his approval was 50.8% and his disapproval was 42.8%. That was a plus 8-point approval.

September began with his disapproval at 47.2% and his approval at 46.8% — a deficit of 0.4 points. FJB’s approval has been underwater ever since. His deficit was 17.8 points on Saturday.

 
I would like to think he was done in by a photograph of him looking at his watch as the caskets of 13 American troops killed by the Taliban. This was deliberate. He looked at his watch several times during the ceremony at the airfield in Dover, Delaware.

It also was reminiscent of George H.W. Bush checking his watch during a debate with Bill Clinton.

But realistically, the photo of Biden wanting to get the ceremony over with had little if any impact. Oh, people like me cared but we already disapprove of the guy.

His haphazard surrender of Afghanistan did him in. The public saw that he left behind billions of dollars worth of military equipment in a manner reminiscent of Vietnam, a war that helped catapult him into the Senate as a peacenik.

The difference in 2021 was Americans didn’t much care about Afghanistan because no one was drafted to fight it, the protests were few, and the feeling was that we had won. Ditching Afghanistan did him in.

College football crowds began chanting Fuck Joe Biden. This shocked me because college students are supposed to be socialist tools who just repeat whatever their pinko professors say. The media tried to ignore the chants but when the chants hit NASCAR, the media had to notice. Instead of telling the truth, they lied.

The lie backfired.

AP reported,

“It started at an Oct. 2, 2021. NASCAR race at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. Brandon Brown, a 28-year-old driver, had won his first Xfinity Series and was being interviewed by an NBC Sports reporter [Kelli Stavast]. The crowd behind him was chanting something at first difficult to make out. The reporter suggested they were chanting ‘Let’s go, Brandon’ to cheer the driver. But it became increasingly clear they were saying: ‘F—- Joe Biden.’”

That lie hurt Biden because it gave Biden’s critics a G-rated way of conveying the message, which made it mainstream among disappointed Biden supporters. AP called it “coded crudity.” Well, reporters had better learn to code better because they were the ones who made it possible to say FJB without saying it. Trump supporters should thank Kelli Stavast for being dishonest. Had she told the truth, the FJB chant likely would have died a natural death.

 
Inflation started kicking in, but Biden found a way to hide it and actually closed his disapproval gap to minus 9.8 points a year later by giving what he called a Dark Brandon speech in Philadelphia in August 2022 which he portrayed his opponents as evil threats to democracy because they did not vote Democrat.

Read more